I finished Family Storiline earlier this week and now i am close to finishing Cultist Storyline too. I played game for like 63h and i am currently Level 46. So now that i shared my progress i will talk more about game itself. I will start with things that i liked because i have a lot more to say about things that i didn't like.
Overall i like the world (i will talk about issues later) and there are a lot of beautiful locations that made me smile more than once.
As i said some of the locations are truly breathtaking and that kinda makes me bit sad for the reasons i will elaborate bit later. Another thing that i liked way more than in Origins and i must say more than in Syndicate are more important characters that you meet during the game. Compared to Origins there are way more interesting and historical characters like Hippocrates, Socrates, Herodotus, Barnabas, Xenia, Phoebe, Alkibiades... So it was way easier to follow story and remember quests than it was in Origins. And story in quests is way better than it was on Origins, a lot better.
But that is more-less i liked about this game. Everything else ranges from really bad to mediocre for me. Let's star with Family Storyline. In short as i said before that is like 10h Storyline artificially stretched to 50h. What is even worse is that even after you go through those 50h you don't get any kind of payoff. Ending of that Storyline is so bad (i got good ending)and disappointing that makes it even worse that i spent 50h to finish it). Entrier Storyline is more-less straight forward with maybe 1 twist and that's it. Even with all of those interesting characters you don't get to connect with either of them. There are like 0 emotions through entire game because writing and actor performances are raging from bad to mediocre (and there were few moments where there should be a lot of emotions). And entire story clashes with gameplay, you are neutral mercenary who works for money but only at the beginning. as story goes on your motives change and in the end it feels awkward that you can attack both Spartan and Athenian camps and fortresses. So yeah Familly Storyline was really disappointing and from what i did for Cult Storyline i don't think that it will be any better than Family one. I played very little of Atlantis one so i won't talk about that.
Next thing i will talk about are quests and quest design. In short it is better than Origins but it is still repetitive slog for the most part. They simply picked gameplay mechanics first and designed every single quest around them no matter if it fits the narrative or not. There is part of the game where you can feel how wasted opportunity it was just because they were not willing to make one off (they still could be used in other quests) mechanics. Without spoiling too much i am talking about certain part of the game where you compete. Another example is A Life's Dedication treasure hunt questline (i talked about it before) where Instead of solving puzzles and riddles to solve it you do fetch quests. And even worse thing is that there is big story hinted through that questline and in the end you get nothing from that, and payoff for all of that fetching is so bad that really pissed me. Rest of the quests are more-less same, i can;t remember how many times i heard almost the same spoken lines during those quest. There are literally same quests that you do just for different factions. In the end 90% of the time you will end up raiding camps/caves/fortresses for various reasons. Very little creativity and variety. And that's sad because as i said before there were truly moments where they could make amazing things, they just had to abandon template they set. And there are quests where you just go, talk to the NPC and quest is over. There are also questlines where instead of making one big quest every part of the questline is new quest.
Now let's talk about combat. For me it's boring because for the most parts enemies are sword sponges. And big impact on that has level saline (i will talk about that bit later). Big reason for boring me are also animations because there is very little variety in animations during combat, for a 100h game. After like 5h you will more-less see all combat moves and you will look at them for the rest of the game. Abilities you get to use are not that interesting to be honest. Especially when combined with level scaling. There is nothing worse than performing brutal attack that is max level and dealing like 5% damage. Other types of abilities like lighting your weapon on fire are kinda useless because you deal very little additional damage and to find if enemy is vulnerable to fire you need to use your eagle (that is not what you want to do in the middle of the fight). And don't get me started about assassinations where you never know if you will assassinate target or just deal damage. Sometimes you will kill target even if meter doesn't show that you will, sometimes you wont. Last combat related thing i will talk about are boss battles. They are awful. Ubisoft clearly went after Souls lite bosses but they didn't even come close. The worst are Legendary animals where animals have erratic movement patterns and dodging doesn't work that great. Good example is Hyena battle where i missed so many dodges and even attacks because of unpredictable movement and dodge button outright refusing to work.Every time i got hit or died in Sekiro for example i knew it was my fault, in Odyssey i felt that it was almost never my fault.
While we are at combat i hate ship part of the game and i loved it in Black Flag. Between boats spawning from thin air to help ship that i am fighting with and awkward ship controls i hated it. Boarding felt so bad too.
Rest of the things i would like to talk are exploration mode, save system, level scaling, atmosphere and cities and other various things. I will start with exploration mode (i played entire game with that mode), simply after few hours it becomes boring and annoying for multiple reasons. Flow is always the same, talk to NPC, open and mark place on the map, as soon as you enter 150m radius around that place you get prompt to use eagle. Now repeat that 300 times. Why should we use eagle every single time?Not to mention that often you will get vague directions from NPC but written ones will be way more detailed, or you will even get waypoint directly in some cases. If you will put something like exploration mode in game then players should find clues and locations without any hints. Go talk to people nearby or find clues around the world. For new players i would recommend to try this mode but most of you will probably get bored fast.
Also i had issues with save system. I don't remember if this was the case on Origins but in Odyssey i would often lose like 5-10 minutes of progress because save system is different from older games where game would save constantly. One of the examples is fight with one of the Legendary animals. I finished fight, got notification that i finished fight, got notification that i finished that area, i looted animal, decided that i had it enough for a day, exited game. And then when i started game next day and pressed continue game loaded save before fight when i synced viewpoint. Today i sailed for like 5 minutes, discovered underwater ruin, went for treasure, shark killed me, game loaded me to the part where i was before that 5 minute sail. And so on, forts are the worst, entire fort resets even if there is only one thing left to do.
Level scaling is another annoying thing that is in the game. You can end up fighting damn boar for 1+ minute because of that. You simply never feel progression that much. Yes you get new abilities but they are on cooldown so you use them like every 30 seconds and between that you are just spamming ordinary attacks. Add to that enemies that are sword sponges and you get bored fast.
Another thing that disappointed me were cities. They are beautiful to look but they feel like they are artificial. There are a lot of NPCs in them but they don't feel alive. Hearing same song over and over again and same conversations (if you can hear them) doesn't help. On top of that making a lot of ordinary public building guarded places where you can't even com close without fighting is stupid. Add to that lack of taverns or places where you could sit and watch surroundings, lots of merchants that are not selling anything to you and you simply don't have reason to explore them that much and they fell like stages and not like real cities.
So in short Ubisoft went too big and they made really shallow game that tried many things and did non of them well. They refused to move away from few templates they had for quests no matter what and wasted a lot of potentially good moments because of that. We got beautiful world to explore that is in reality kinda empty and more you play more artificial it feels, especially in the cities. And story and quests that should bring everything together often en up disappointing and as rest of the game shallow. They really should abandon making huge but shallow worlds and make them 1/3 of the Odyssey size but with more variety in both story, quests and gameplay mechanics. And please bring back mini games.
I will slowly continue to play Odyssey and DLCs to reach 100% this year (i did all mainline AC games 100% after all) and i will probably post about DLCs too.
